Testing the BD-A1020 using our Secrets HDMI Benchmark, the BD-A1020 is perfect with 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 colorspaces, but has issues with RGB output. Looking at the image examples below, the correct output is on top and the Yamaha is on the bottom. You can see that the Yamaha rises out of shadows much slower than it should, and then it also reaches its peak output too early as well, compressing the dynamic range. Even if your display handles RGB better than YCbCr typically, no one should use RGB mode, as it results in a clearly inferior image.

On our Blu-ray and DVD Benchmark, the Yamaha performs better but has a few issues. With mixed film and video content we get some clear combing artifacts as it locks onto one cadence and not both of them. Over HDMI a pixel is cropped on the left side of the screen, an error that shouldn't happen anymore but still does. With the more basic tests jagged edges are smoothed well, but on more strenuous tests like the ship video on the Spears and Munsil disc there are jaggies that appear. Responsiveness, as noted earlier, is quite slow and disappointing for the price of the player.

On the Blu-ray loading tests, these times are the slowest of any player tested in the last 18 months. It was very slow to power up and start loading a disc, and one it did begin to load the drive mechanism and the processor are both slow. The single most annoying speed issue was the time it took from leaving the setup screen to resuming a title. It was close to 10 seconds before the loading icon would appear on the screen, a gigantic delay in comparison to every other player on the market.

On the audio bench tests, the Yamaha BD-A1020 did a very good job. THD+N with a 1 kHz test tone was very low with 16/44.1 audio at 0.0021% and 0.0011% with 24/96 DVD-Audio materials. You can see that the noise floor for DVD-Audio material is very low all the way out past 90 kHz where CD audio content starts to rise past the 22050 Hz limit.

With the 10 kHz test tone the performance was also very good, with 0.0019% THD+N on CD audio and 0.0015% on DVD-Audio. The 2nd harmonic was around 100 dB below the fundamental tone, which is very good.

IMD performance with 60 Hz and 7000 Hz tones wasn't as good, with IMD percentages of 0.0277% for CD Audio and 0.0285% for DVD-Audio. These numbers are still about what we see with similarly priced players like the Oppo BDP-103.

With 19 kHz and 20 kHz IMD tones, sidebands were almost invisible with CD Audio content but more prevalent on DVD-Audio tests. Of course these only show up on the DVD-Audio tests because the noise floor is lower than on CD Audio, so both really have the same IMD performance here. The errors are just hidden on the CD tests due to the higher noise floor.

For audio tests, the Yamaha BD-A1020 does a very good job, with very low THD+N numbers and IMD results that are good as well. DVD-Audio exhibits a lower noise floor than CD as we would expect, but both have around 100dB of dynamic range and a very quiet background.